La Tortue Cynique / The Cynical Turtle

XMLRPC for mail delivery?

Caramail is a famous (at least here) free mail account hosting service. Today its mailer daemon sent me that:

Command died with status 1: "/usr/sbin/mail.local".
Command output: xmlrpc_client.c:185: assertion failed

It's rather strange to involve an heavywight protocol for mail delivery. And it's even more troubling that the delivery fails because of that. I'm wondering what they are doing with it...(Cyberpunk, 2003/03/30 09:44) lien permanent

JMS continued, little touch of SWT....

Thanks to Fokko, pointing me to this valuable resource, I was able to proceed in my understanding of both JMS and JNDI. My first goal is to write basically a simple sender and listener of differents queues, in order to eventually simulate the reactions of a target system (programs running on a mainframe) of the main application.

In those times were everybody is asking for web application, I've chosen to write a little GUI app, a good occasion to work a little with SWT. The only "difficulty" of this realisation is that one important source of events in the application (JMS messages) are not arriving through the UI event dispatching thread. So, there is a little chunk of code designed to update the UI properly during those phases. Here are two screenshots of the gorgeous user interface:

The app is simply configured through a property file (no, I won't use XML for such a thing). Here is the one used for the screenshots:

#url=file\:///D\:/mqlocaljndi/
#initialContextFactory=com.sun.jndi.fscontext.RefFSContextFactory
#queueConnectionFactory=myappqcf
#sendQueue[0]=queue\\myapp\\returnfunca
#sendQueue[1]=queue\\myapp\\returnfuncb
#receiveQueue[0]=queue\\myapp\\notifyfunca
#receiveQueue[1]=queue\\myapp\\notifyfuncb

url=jnp://localhost:1099
initialContextFactory=org.jnp.interfaces.NamingContextFactory
queueConnectionFactory=ConnectionFactory
sendQueue[0]=queue/A
sendQueue[1]=queue/B
receiveQueue[0]=queue/A
receiveQueue[1]=queue/C

The first line are uncommented when I work with WebSphere MQ's JMS implementation, the second part is when I use JBoss' JMS implementation. And that's it, it just works for now. I think I've to wait for the final implementation (with an etherogeneous environment) to see the trickiest parts.(Cyberpunk, 2003/03/27 19:23) lien permanent

JBoss, JMS and WebSphere MQ

Trying for two days to run WebSphere MQ (formerly MQSeries) within JBoss and its JMS provider. The problem is that... it's the first time I use those 3 things Regarding the development, JBoss works surprisingly well: fast startup time, "easy" configuration. It's not easy in the sense that you have to throw yourself into the sea of config files, whereas Weblogic, WebSphere and Tomcat 4 made us used to web admin interfaces. But after some attempts, given that you start with 3 different sets of config files and that the startup process is robust, it proves to be really usable.

The JMS thingy is really a joy to work with: clean and simple API, I would like to work with that everyday!

Now the tough part, well... after you did it, it's not tough at all. WebSphere MQ exposes two Java APIs, the "native" one, and the JMS bindings. If you choose JMS, you lose the ability to do synchronous request/answer through messaging. In my case it's pure asynchronous conversation, so the choice is really quickly done.

Making JBoss 3 to use MQSeries instead of JBossMQ is really... nothing (after reading JBoss' forums: a great help). Simply erase jbossmq-destinations-service.xml and jbossmq-service.xml from the default configuration, and populate the JNDI tree with JMSAdmin. And... it simply works. I would prefer a way to keep my configuration persistent in the JNDI tree, but I don't understand how "pcallies" solution works. Mapping jndi entries to the filesystem seems rather strange to me in this case, or maybe I'm missing some way to configure MQSeries through property files. Any help regarding this point is welcome.

Regarding the bad side of those attempts, I regret IBM's lock-in. You can't use an external access to WebSphereAS JNDI tree without the IBM JRE. In fact, the InitialContextFactory provided with WSAS is at one point strongly linked with IBM own CORBA implementation. I tried to access it with the standard J2EE 1.3 implementation, and then WebSphereAS has thrown at my face a 1229124488 CODESET_INCOMPATIBLE, which is an undocumented error (ORB errors)... So for now I wont use WebSphereAS as a true application server, but just as a glorified web server.(Cyberpunk, 2003/03/24 18:54) lien permanent

Winamp plugin: LongPlayer

I discovered today LongPlayer, a standalone application, pluggable with Winamp and XMMS. This application monitors what you are listening to, allows you to rate the music, and to build custom playlists. Since it records what you are listening to and when, LongPlayer is able to feed Winamp or XMMS with songs you haven't heard too often in the past and that you like the most.

I like the concept, so I give it a try with my small collection of MP3, 1GB ripped from my CDs for which I feel I can need to listen to them at any random time. I'll see next week if the concept works.(Cyberpunk, 2003/03/02 13:36) lien permanent